Right
now, I must confess, I'm feeling queasy about my stash of Sarah Palin porn. I
was collecting it with a mind to write an article about it, I swear. I thought
it was funny and revealing that the Great American Subconscious was percolating
up Photoshopped images of Palin getting fucked by Barack Obama's giant socialist
cock.

But the events of the last few weeks
have made me stop and think.

Let's start with Brit Hume of Fox
News, who on Sunday managed the truly incredible feat of blaming Chris Christie's George Washington Bridge scandal on women:

"I
have to say that in this sort of feminized atmosphere in which we exist today,
guys who are masculine and muscular like that in their private conduct and are
kind of old-fashioned tough guys run some risks—by which I mean that men today
have learned the lesson the hard way that if you act like kind of an
old-fashioned guy's guy, you're in constant danger of slipping out and saying
something that's going to get you in trouble and make you look like a sexist or
make you look like you seem thuggish or whatever."

So Christie is both a macho tough guy
and the pitiful victim of a bunch of females? The mind boggles; the face palms.
For poor-widdle-me victim-whining propaganda like that, you really need to call
in the professionals at Fox.

This came six days after Amanda Hess's
deeply disturbing article
about the harassment women face on the internet, which begins with the story of
the many death threats she received from an anonymous man posting under the
name "headlessfemalepig." Charming stuff like, "You suck a lot of drunk and
drug fucked guys cocks … im going to rape you and remove your head. … You are
going to die and I am the one who is going to kill you."

Hess called the cops, who brushed it
off. She called the FBI, who brushed it off. And her inbox kept filling up with
more: "Amanda, I'll fucking rape you. How does that feel?"

Hess's experience was not by any means
an isolated incident. She cites a blogger named Alyssa Royse who dared to write
a negative review of The Dark Knight, which
earned this response: "you are clearly retarded, i hope someone shoots then
rapes you." A writer at Jezebel named Lindy West got "I just want to rape her
with a traffic cone." A technology writer named Kathy Sierra got "i hope
someone slits your throat and cums down your gob."

The real shock is the statistics. In
one study, Hess writes, "Feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually
explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7."

A
hundred to 3.7? That's
a pretty fucking dramatic difference. Another statistic shows how large the chilling
effect may be: "From 2000 to 2005, the percentage of internet users who
participate in online chats and discussion groups dropped from 28 percent to 17
percent entirely because of women's fall
off in participation."

This makes my knee-jerk response—shrug
it off, toughen up—seem beyond stupid. Especially when Hess throws in the story
of Jessica Valenti, a feminist writer who was so frightened by her own internet
death threats that she fled her apartment and changed her bank accounts.

Knee-jerk response #2—disconnect—is
equally inadequate. In a world where more and more work (and life) flows
through, or on, the internet, most women don't have the option of logging off.

What is happening here is a hostile
work environment on a global scale. Yet digital companies like Twitter and
Reddit—and even pioneering liberal groups like the Electronic Freedom
Foundation—continue to take absolutist positions on internet freedom. Even a
liberal journalist like David Margolick on NPR tends to dismiss this kind of
thing as "juvenile, immature, and obnoxious, but that is all they are …
frivolous frat-boy rants."

Which brings us to knee-jerk reaction
#3, which is that this is all just virtual. Leaving aside the troublesome
philosophical issues that rise in any distinction between reality and illusion,
Hess shows the real-world consequences. After fleeing her apartment, for
example, Valenti also "stopped promoting her speaking events publicly, enlisted
security for her public appearances, signed up for a service to periodically
scrub the web of her private information, invested in a post-office box and
begun periodically culling her Facebook friend list in an attempt to filter out
readers with ulterior motives." Hess herself filed for a civil protection order
against her persecutor, which took five visits to family court. But the day the
protection order expired, the creep started writing again and even had the gall
to send a LinkedIn request: "Your stalker would like to add you to his
professional network."

After I read all this, I thought about
how my wife and sister used to come home vibrating with rage at the hisses and
catcalls of men on the street. But my mind still kept grasping at excuses—it's
a big internet, a few crazies are bound to come out of the cracks, most men aren't
like that.

Then a feminist writer named Jill
Filipovic wrote an even more disturbing piece
listing the threats she got on a law-school message board during her student
days: "I want to brutally rape that Jill slut. … I'm 98% sure that she should
be raped. … She's a normal-sized girl that I'd bang violently, maybe you'd have
to kill her afterwards."

These were not random internet
crazies. They knew her. They wrote of
seeing her around the law school, of knowing her ex-boyfriend. One even showed
up at a law-school classroom to confront her. As Filipovic puts it: "Imagine
going to work and every few days having people in the hallway walk up to you
and say things like, 'Die, you dumb cunt' and 'you deserve to be raped.' … Consider
how that would impact your performance and your sense of safety."

The most sensitive conservative
response came from Ross Douthat in the New
York Times. Clearly disturbed by the attacks, he began by criticizing his fellow conservatives:
"The grotesque abuse that liberal, feminist writers can receive for being
liberal feminists is a scandal that conservatives, especially, need to
acknowledge and deplore."

But quickly, and with much more
enthusiasm, he turned the tables to his favorite subject—slamming liberals who
regard "sexual license as an unalloyed good" and want to "lash out against the
strictures it feels that feminism and political correctness have placed on male
liberty." For examples, he offered "lad magazines, pick-up artists and Seth
MacFarlane on Oscar night." In his view, despite some artful hedging, the internet
trolls are mostly liberal men who want to punish women "for the culture's
failure to deliver a beer-commercial vision of male happiness."

Which brings me to my stash of Palin
porn. I want to say that she started it by sexualizing herself with that famous
wink to the audience at the Republican Convention that mesmerized National Review'sRich Lowry after she did it again in the Vice Presidential Debate*, not to mention the pregnant teenage-out-of-wedlock
daughter and all the pious Christian moralizing that accompanied it. Then I
realized that sounds an awful lot like "she asked for it." The truth is, I took
some pleasure in her virtual "humiliation." (Not that I think sex with Obama
would be a humiliation, but you know what I mean.)

I'm confessing to this because I hate
the tribalism of left and right. I tend to think we all want the same things—good
jobs, happy children, loving partners—and just differ on the means. So I have
to admit I see what Douthat seems to be getting at. I do want that beer-commercial
happiness; I do want Palin punished for being so nasty and mean.

And it goes deeper than that. Men might
dominate in the big world of money and business, but we all grow up under the
dominion of a giant all-powerful woman who commands us to, ugh, behave. And
when we grow up, we discover that despite all the myths of masculinity and its
relationship to power, the successful prosecution of our most vital instinctual
drive is completely in the hands of women. They have a veto over our freakin'
sex lives, for fuck's sake. And if you are fat or shy or nerdy, you probably
have felt it go beyond veto to actual scorn, which is even worse in a world
where you're supposed to be powerful. It makes you a double loser. And losers "lash
out."

That said, and maybe this is my own
tribalism talking, but I would turn Douthat's emphasis on its head. All men are
threatened by women's power, but conservatives are especially threatened for
all the reasons we already know—gender equality, sexual and reproductive
freedom, the crumbling patriarchy, women in the military, etc., etc., etc. And
let's face it—the tone of these sex trolls
is the tone of the right-wing. It is the sneering contemptuous and
borderline-violent tone of right-wing trolls in the comments section of liberal
websites, the sneering and contemptuous tone of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and Mark
Levin and all the other right-wing radio hosts and the sneering and
contemptuous tone hidden in plain sight in the smug insanity of Brit Hume's
Christie defense.

Consider, for example, the tone of radio
host Pete Santelli when he attacked
Hillary Clinton last summer:

"I want to shoot her right in the
vagina and I don't want her to die right away; I want her to feel the pain and
I want to look her in the eyes and I want to say, on behalf of all Americans
that you've killed…"

Okay, enough of that. You get the
point. And this is not to let my tribe of the hook, because the nastiness seems
to be rising on both sides. In response to a perfectly reasonable article in Salon on Wednesday called "I Fell In Love With A Republican," in which a liberal writer named Samantha
Dunn explains how she overcame her politics for a conservative man who was
loyal, funny, well-read and adventurous—a former punk rocker, even—some Salon readers responded like so: "Next article in the same set: 'I married a KKK member! He's really
sweet and nice, I promise! He is loyal to his family! He's a
wonderful guy!"

That's so depressing. Call me old-fashioned, but I think
liberals should be, you know, liberal. My
usual answer to all things is that less repression would make for less self-hatred
and, therefore, less cruelty. (Old joke: Sex is a misdemeanor—the more you
miss, the meaner you get.) But alas, Samantha Dunn and her husband
notwithstanding, good sex doesn't solve everything. So let's make a deal. On
behalf of the liberal tribe, I'll delete those Palin pictures and try not to
laugh at that kind of partisan snark ever again if you right-wing hotheads try
to get back to the old cloth-coat Republican virtues of decency and community.
If we all stop being so goddamn mean, maybe we'll find out what we've been
missing.

*This article originally stated Chris Matthews "got a tingle up his leg" from Palin. He actually said he got a "thrill up his leg" from Obama and later said to Steve Schmidt, the man who picked Palin for John McCain's ticket, that Schmidt got "the thrill" from Palin. To which Schmidt replied, "I think mine went away faster." (h/t to reader Kelly B.)